20 Years After My So-Called Life, Bess Armstrong Reveals What Creators Planned For Season Two

Bess Armstrong knows she freaked you out a little bit when she popped up as Roger Sterling’s drug-pushing therapist acquaintance on Mad Men, and that during her season-long run on House of Lies, her mean boss character may have sometimes sounded like she was just scolding Angela. It’s been 20 years today since My So-Called Life began its short and fiercely beloved single season on ABC, but Armstrong—like nearly all of the cast—is still defined, to multiple generations of fans, by the exasperating but loving mom, Patty.

“[I hear from] the people who watched the show and dreamed that Patty Chase was their mother, who wished that Patty was their mother, and the people who their nightmare was that Patty was their mother,” says Armstrong, describing fans from teenage girls to men in their 40s who approach her with their love for the show. Produced by thirtysomething veterans Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, My So-Called Life, as Armstrong describes it, “dared to be as much about the parents as it was about the kids.” Though fans still swoon over Angela (Claire Danes) and Jordan (Jared Leto) making out in the boiler room and empathize with Brian (Devon Gummersall) and his unrequited crush on Angela, the marital strife between Armstrong’s Patty and Tom Irwin’s Graham was often just as compelling. The season ended on a cliffhanger for the kids—Angela drives off with Jordan!—but for Patty and Graham as well, with him well on his way to an affair with restaurant business partner Hallie Lowenthal. (Twenty years later, her name is still grating, isn’t it?)

Would that affair have happened? According to Armstrong, that was totally the plan. “[Creator] Winnie [Holzman] had told me that, because Graham was beginning that affair, I know I was going to go into a major depression. I know that she told me that the thing which was going to force Angela to become more of the adult in the household. I swear on a stack of Bibles, she did tell me this. And Angela was going to be forced to become more of the adult.”

On top of that heartbreak, Armstrong says Holzman had planned even more trouble for Rickie [Wilson Cruz], who had been kicked out of his home, briefly lived on the street, and bunked with the Chase family for a while before being taken in by a teacher. “What was ultimately going to get Patty up and out of her depression was something terrible that was happening to Rickie,” Armstrong says. “Rickie was somehow going to be in trouble, and that was going to be what got her up and out of bed.”

The season 2 scripts were never written, and Armstrong says Holzman may deny all of this. (She did not respond to our request for comment.) But the bond between Patty and Rickie, at least, has been able to continue in real life. She and Cruz joined Holzman and several other cast members, at the Austin Television Festival last June. Out on the town after their panel with Devon Odessa (who played Sharon Cherski) and Gummersall, Armstrong says, it was Cruz who got the most reverent attention. “People would actually gasp—one group of people came up and grabbed Wilson’s hands and knelt in front of him.” And when they realized that Rickie was walking down the street with Patty Chase and Sharon and Brian Krakow? “Their poor little intoxicated brains were completely blown.”

My So-Called Life aired only 19 episodes before being canceled due to low ratings, though it received one of the early versions of the fan-led “save our show” campaigns; it seems clear that, in the current era of niche-driven shows and “six seasons and a movie,” My So-Called Life would easily have survived. “They didn’t know what to do with the show, that was quite honestly it,” Armstrong says now. “I felt like Cassandra in Troy running around saying ‘I know this is great, you’re going to regret this!’ ”

MTV began airing re-runs of the showbefore it was even officially canceled, establishing My So-Called Life almost instantly as a cult success. For Armstrong, the new lease on life was a double-edged sword. “I was forever identified with Patty, so in some cases it cost me work,” she says. “One time I remember my agent called and said there was a show they had called and expressed interest in me for. [Then] ‘They suddenly realized they were thinking of you and Tom Irwin for the parents again, and it freaked them out and they backed away.’ ”

“On one hand it was such a privilege to be identified with that character,” Armstrong continues. “But at the moment it was tough.” Armstrong says she knew Patty would have been her “defining role” as a middle-aged person, and that she was “very, very crushed” when the show was canceled, so much that she hasn’t revisited many of the episodes since. But when the cast reunited to record commentaries for a new DVD release in 2007, she and Tom Irwin and Mary Kay Place (who played Camille Cherski) watched episodes together, and the recording served as “my first major update on the kids,” referring to the teen actors. “We were always refer to them as our kids.” Since the show ended she has remained close friends with Holzman, Place, and Tom Irwin, attended Devon Odessa’s wedding and baby shower, and gets e-mails from Cruz every time he runs into her sons, now in their 20s. “My kids have run into Wilson over the years at various gyms in West Hollywood,” she says.

When her sons were teenagers Armstrong took a break from acting—“It’s so rare that teenagers actually want to sit down and talk to you, you’ve kinda got to be there to catch those moments.” House of Lies, in 2013, was her first major role since returning, and she’s popped up for single-episode stints on Mad Men, True Blood, and Drop Dead Diva in the last few years. But My So-Called Life remains the reason fans will follow her into the Trader Joe’s parking lot or with tears in their eyes. “I feel honored that I was part of that,” Armstrong says. “Something that touched so many people.”

And even if you catch her newer work and can’t get her older characters out of your head, that’s OK too. The day after her Mad Men episode aired, her friends sent links to several reaction pieces, one of which included Armstrong’s favorite line: “If I were having an acid dream, Patty Chase would be in it.”